A recent viral tweet by Micah Springut, founder of stone-carving startup Monumental Labs, argued that it will be cheaper to build buildings with stone than with steel or concrete within the next 10 years.
Well argued article, especially like the focus on economies of scale, perhaps the least understood driver of economic growth but probably one of the most major factors.
Less ambitious use of stone might be to replace bricks, we use a lot of bricks in house construction in UK. Manufacturing bricks is fairly energy intensive so maybe automation could shift the balance between the ease of handling clay vs cost of cutting raw stone? Potentially early adaptors who just prefer the finish of stone could drive this even at higher costs.
I’ve seen jobs designed with stone around windows that got value-engineered to concrete. If stone got cheaper I’d expect more stone trim first, then veneer.
That seems feasible, especially as in many parts of the country lots of bricklayers are also trained/experienced in stonework. The quarrying industry also seems relatively stable if not particularly headline grabbing, although I am unsure if it could deal with greatly increased demand, I'd imagine building stone is not very efficient to import.
Could stone replace concrete for residential slabs and foundation walls? Then build a stick framed house on top. This could save time and CO2 in the building process.
The "case against stone" as a replacement for concrete and steel is so clear it never went to trial. A subtractive process from an irregular material (particularly with the density and hardness of stone) will never be a cost effective alternative to consistent, moldable and formed parts. But isn't reducing the cost of bespoke stone parts enough of a triumph on its own without making this crazy claim? Cool tech!
Has anybody considered how to deal with overall weight, insulations, U-values, thermal bridges and the like? We went from stone to concrete/steel not just because we wanted to get rid of that "beautiful past" those very nostalgic and anti-progress guys rant on Twitter. It's funny because they always highlight beautiful palace and churches, namely buildings for nobles and aristocrats. They always omit housing standards of middle-income people like them. Oh wait, middle-income people simply didn't exist yet!
If Brunelleschi was alive today, he would have followed a contemporary style, not the one from 1400. I thought and hoped decorations and ornament died with 1900.
When I worked for a construction company that specialized in load-bearing stone houses, the thermal mass was important to consider in the designs of stone buildings. No thermal bridging with stone, so you don't have to really worry about that, but you do have to worry about humidity, so we still insulated the buildings that had conditioned spaces. We set stones using cranes, and we owned our crane, so we didn't have rental costs to consider. Since the stones are load bearing, we only had to worry about the foundation supporting the stone. Foundations were done with concrete. We probably wouldn't have recommended building a load bearing stone house in a swampy location. We were in a region in Texas that is a lot of clay with shale & limestone sometimes just inches below the soil, bedrock can be as shallow as 2 ft.
My comment in response to literally anyone who thinks along those lines is and always will be: “The more ornamented the building, the poorer and more miserable the workers who built it, virtually always.”
Well, as architect myself, I realised over time how concepts like beauty or richness are very subjective, and that probably the only principle very deep into our human nature are things like symmetry or colour palette harmony, for instance. Definitely I would struggle working with ornaments on a contemporary building, since it would be a language that doesn't belong to my era, same as I wouldn't write music in a 16th century style if I were a musician.
Human arts and crafts luckily evolve so we can embrace variety and new kind of beauties. And even those beautiful buildings from the Renaissance or Gothics were not just a matter of trying to emulate Romans or Greeks, but also to push boundaries of construction, i.e. gothic churches had buttresses because they needed to be higher, not because they needed to make workers less miserable. There is definitely a certain beauty and richness in a classic Palazzo, but I would see the same level of perfection in a OMA's works made by glass and steel. That is human ingenuity as its best, yesterday as today.
I wouldn't go that far. I would appreciate any advance that brings a level of ornamentation back within reach for ordinary building projects.
As for modern architecture, I'll merely point out that aside from trained architects, basically everyone else dislikes everything y'all have concocted since the end of the Art Deco movement, and that's stayed constant for 100 years and counting. Brutalism and glass-box modernism are failures in the eyes of the masses, and I agree with them.
I am cognizant of the fact that owners aren't paying for ornamentation, but I won't pretend that vice is virtue.
Brutalism is having its recognition today more than ever and many buildings are being preserved now before it's too late.
Anyway, for people loving "ornaments" or the like, I can guarantee a small change is already happening within the design world. Elements such as arches - almost banned only 10yrs ago - are now more frequent, even in corporate skyscrapers. Recess or articulated brickworks are very common to express the facade of a brick building, even when it's just a precast construction method. But this is more like architects trying to find new ways to emerge and differentiate themselves when the world is full of copy/paste buildings due to globalization and the internet. So, I wouldn't be surprised to see decorations part of the equation again, one day. Until we'll get tired again and come back to cleanliness as form of beauty, in an eternal cycle- like we switched in furniture, from heavy and pompous decorated timber to Swedish design pure lines.
“Brutalism is having its recognition today more than ever and many buildings are being preserved now before it's too late.”
Yes, because unfortunately all the committees which select “works of merit” to preserve are made up of trained architects. Based on the polling results, very consistent since the late 1960’s, if you asked Boston’s median citizen what should be done with city hall they’d ask to have it burnt to the ground and start over. The same applies in virtually every city with a prominent work of brutalist-school architecture.
I’m with the median citizen, as I said. Destroy every example of brutalism, everywhere, except one, and then turn that one into a pigeon colony to serve as an example.
I’m sorry, but design schools have lost the plot since 1950. Hopefully if ornamentation becomes cheap owners will expect and demand it despite their architects crying about it.
Back in the 1980s, I remember a discussion about whether the processor of the future would be the CISC with an x86 instruction set or RISC with a much simpler instruction set. RISC had obvious speed and design advantages. My friend pointed out that the industry had standardized on x86, so the sheer volume production would drive immense performance improvements. If you look inside any high performance x86 chip from the last three decades, you'd find a sophisticated set of circuits that turned the x86 CISC instruction flow into an internal adaptive RISC flow. Still, my friend was right. The sheer economic mass of the hardware and software industries put CISC chips way out ahead.
Only now has RISC started taking a lead. Apple, an immensely profitable company, had the sheer mass needed to advance RISC architecture in its A and M series. It might be possible for stone to standardize and become a serious, mass building material. It would take a massive effort and perhaps a patron firm, like Apple, with high enough profits to fund the necessary R&D.
One big downside is that "stone" covers a lot of ground. If you've ever had granite counters installed, you'd know that there are a lot of different kinds of granite with the differences being mainly esthetic. No one sees the steel or wood framing, and what they say about visible concrete structures is not always flattering. With stone used as a visible element, the material fabrication process cannot start until the building has been designed and materials chosen. Unless architects are willing to settle for a commodity set of stone materials, this puts stone at a disdavantage.
You argue that OSB is cheaper than lumber boards, and concrete then stone because of lower costs of supply but ignore demand. Demand and willingness to pay is significantly higher for stone and whole lumber.
In a competitive market then prices should approach the costs of production. I wonder if part of the reason lumber is more expensive is just profits by the lumber companies.
Given that stone associated with prestige, could you not start with the luxury market before reaching economics of scale. As you mentioned it is also far less carbon intensive than steel and cement, so you might also get some "environmentally conscious" corporations to buy it as well. Basically do the Tesla strategy.
What are using to automate the stone shaping process? CNC machining? If so would the lower cost of electricity due to solar panels lead to the strategy becoming more viable?
Re: stone - the problems with stone are as you noted, but you left out a major one: transportation. You reference this indirectly with the flowable section, but large pre-worked stone objects are incredibly unwieldy to transport - and probably extremely expensive to transport across long distances. I am quite certain there are no large stone quarries near most places that would want to build a 30 story stone tower (of Babel lol), so this is not a purely academic nit to pick. I don't know the numbers, but I would be shocked if the cost and difficulty of transporting massive numbers of large stone support elements is not dramatically higher than steel and pourable concrete.
Semiconductors: What you wrote is not incorrect but is misleading.
It is misleading because you are not looking more deeply into the actual economics of the silicon design chain. In particular - the structural change between say, 1999 and today lies in startup costs.
In 1999, you could tape out a chip for $50,000. The unit costs were higher, but this is mostly a function of the smaller diameter wafers used back then.
In contrast, by 2010 the cost of taping out a new chip was $10 million, and today it is probably closer (or over) $50 million. The extra layers and what not you reference are part of this, but it is also that the small geometries require new steps before production such as optical proximity correction (OPC). The geometry changes also broke Intel's previous economic model of "design once, fabricate to 3 process geometries". The effect of the economic change above is that it effectively destroyed the entire small company/startup ecosystem of chip design.
It isn't hard to raise $500K to tape out a $50K chip several times to get a product to test on the market - but it is virtually impossible to raise $50M to do the same with $10M tapeouts - and I don't even want to think about $50M tapeouts.
The effect was to change what used to be a widely varied and dynamic chip design ecosystem into a handful of giant corporations, with all of the attendant loss of innovation or any other forms of competition besides deep pockets and massive market presence.
Circling back to stone - it would not shock me if an unspoken objective of these "stone" advocates is precisely the same dynamic as I note above: pourable concrete and steel is a commodity but fancy automated stone cutting is not.
The owners of this fancy tech can exert massive disproportionate market control if only they can force the existing methods out of common practice by, for example, stressing the CO2 emissions aspect of concrete and steel production. Studies will be commissioned decrying the terrible CO2 emissions profile of making concrete while ignoring the CO2 emissions of trucking hundreds of thousands of tons of stone, hundreds of miles or more.
Convincing in general but I think when environmentally minded people talk about the waste inherent in long distance shipping, they mean carbon emissions. A bit weird to counter that argument by focusing on financial costs, obviously it’s cheap to ship cotton to Bangladesh, otherwise corporations wouldn’t do it…
I worked for a construction company who built load-bearing stone structures using CNC technology. It was amazing and breath-taking work. We created processes to reduce costs wherever we could. BUT it was incredibly labor intensive due to the skill needed to set the incredibly heavy stone. We mostly did dry-stacked because it highlighted the stone material qualities & stone masons' craft. Stone cutting with CNCs is inherently a slow process due to the hardness of the material. You can finish the material smooth with the machines, but it depends on the aesthetics desired how long it will take. Finishing with just a saw blade will get you sort of a range of finishes that are like using 50 grit sand paper versus 150 grit. You can polish with the machines, but that takes more time. This process requires water (which we recycled) to prevent the blades/tools from overheating. We were able to run the machines overnight, but they always needed someone to be there to monitor it. Stone has natural inclusions (other material trapped inside the stone) that could be harder or softer than the main stone you're cutting which can cause the equipment to "burp" so the operator needs to pay close attention in case they need to stop or adjust the speed of the blade/tool. Processing materials to the shapes that are needed are just faster in wood, concrete, and steel because their processes are different as mentioned in the article. It certainly is a low cost raw material and when done correctly, adds beauty, thermal mass, and longevity, but there needs to be a lot of evaluation across the whole process to make it competitive in cost to other building systems. Thanks so much for all the great articles. I am generally a skeptic of these sorts of claims, too, but am optimistic that there are people out there thinking about this stuff!
Effective responses of buildings to earthquakes require some degree of flexibility (i.e., compressive and expansive capacity), so that they can sway or otherwise adjust. This seems to me a hard ask for stone.
The only use case in which stone makes economic sense (kinda-sorts) is the one it lasted longest in: compression-bearing structural systems in urban infrastructure, most prominently tunnel arches and arch bridges.
And that only because if it’s dry fit its lifespan is damned near infinite and lifecycle costs very, very low.
And even that doesn’t pencil out well with a reasonable discount rate.
Bringing down the cost of a luxury good and turning it into a mass market luxury is nice but not earth-shattering, so no startup will ever admit that’s what they’re doing. But making more buildings look a bit better is good and we should be happy about it!
Well argued article, especially like the focus on economies of scale, perhaps the least understood driver of economic growth but probably one of the most major factors.
Less ambitious use of stone might be to replace bricks, we use a lot of bricks in house construction in UK. Manufacturing bricks is fairly energy intensive so maybe automation could shift the balance between the ease of handling clay vs cost of cutting raw stone? Potentially early adaptors who just prefer the finish of stone could drive this even at higher costs.
I’ve seen jobs designed with stone around windows that got value-engineered to concrete. If stone got cheaper I’d expect more stone trim first, then veneer.
That seems feasible, especially as in many parts of the country lots of bricklayers are also trained/experienced in stonework. The quarrying industry also seems relatively stable if not particularly headline grabbing, although I am unsure if it could deal with greatly increased demand, I'd imagine building stone is not very efficient to import.
Could stone replace concrete for residential slabs and foundation walls? Then build a stick framed house on top. This could save time and CO2 in the building process.
The "case against stone" as a replacement for concrete and steel is so clear it never went to trial. A subtractive process from an irregular material (particularly with the density and hardness of stone) will never be a cost effective alternative to consistent, moldable and formed parts. But isn't reducing the cost of bespoke stone parts enough of a triumph on its own without making this crazy claim? Cool tech!
Has anybody considered how to deal with overall weight, insulations, U-values, thermal bridges and the like? We went from stone to concrete/steel not just because we wanted to get rid of that "beautiful past" those very nostalgic and anti-progress guys rant on Twitter. It's funny because they always highlight beautiful palace and churches, namely buildings for nobles and aristocrats. They always omit housing standards of middle-income people like them. Oh wait, middle-income people simply didn't exist yet!
If Brunelleschi was alive today, he would have followed a contemporary style, not the one from 1400. I thought and hoped decorations and ornament died with 1900.
When I worked for a construction company that specialized in load-bearing stone houses, the thermal mass was important to consider in the designs of stone buildings. No thermal bridging with stone, so you don't have to really worry about that, but you do have to worry about humidity, so we still insulated the buildings that had conditioned spaces. We set stones using cranes, and we owned our crane, so we didn't have rental costs to consider. Since the stones are load bearing, we only had to worry about the foundation supporting the stone. Foundations were done with concrete. We probably wouldn't have recommended building a load bearing stone house in a swampy location. We were in a region in Texas that is a lot of clay with shale & limestone sometimes just inches below the soil, bedrock can be as shallow as 2 ft.
My comment in response to literally anyone who thinks along those lines is and always will be: “The more ornamented the building, the poorer and more miserable the workers who built it, virtually always.”
Well, as architect myself, I realised over time how concepts like beauty or richness are very subjective, and that probably the only principle very deep into our human nature are things like symmetry or colour palette harmony, for instance. Definitely I would struggle working with ornaments on a contemporary building, since it would be a language that doesn't belong to my era, same as I wouldn't write music in a 16th century style if I were a musician.
Human arts and crafts luckily evolve so we can embrace variety and new kind of beauties. And even those beautiful buildings from the Renaissance or Gothics were not just a matter of trying to emulate Romans or Greeks, but also to push boundaries of construction, i.e. gothic churches had buttresses because they needed to be higher, not because they needed to make workers less miserable. There is definitely a certain beauty and richness in a classic Palazzo, but I would see the same level of perfection in a OMA's works made by glass and steel. That is human ingenuity as its best, yesterday as today.
I wouldn't go that far. I would appreciate any advance that brings a level of ornamentation back within reach for ordinary building projects.
As for modern architecture, I'll merely point out that aside from trained architects, basically everyone else dislikes everything y'all have concocted since the end of the Art Deco movement, and that's stayed constant for 100 years and counting. Brutalism and glass-box modernism are failures in the eyes of the masses, and I agree with them.
I am cognizant of the fact that owners aren't paying for ornamentation, but I won't pretend that vice is virtue.
Brutalism is having its recognition today more than ever and many buildings are being preserved now before it's too late.
Anyway, for people loving "ornaments" or the like, I can guarantee a small change is already happening within the design world. Elements such as arches - almost banned only 10yrs ago - are now more frequent, even in corporate skyscrapers. Recess or articulated brickworks are very common to express the facade of a brick building, even when it's just a precast construction method. But this is more like architects trying to find new ways to emerge and differentiate themselves when the world is full of copy/paste buildings due to globalization and the internet. So, I wouldn't be surprised to see decorations part of the equation again, one day. Until we'll get tired again and come back to cleanliness as form of beauty, in an eternal cycle- like we switched in furniture, from heavy and pompous decorated timber to Swedish design pure lines.
“Brutalism is having its recognition today more than ever and many buildings are being preserved now before it's too late.”
Yes, because unfortunately all the committees which select “works of merit” to preserve are made up of trained architects. Based on the polling results, very consistent since the late 1960’s, if you asked Boston’s median citizen what should be done with city hall they’d ask to have it burnt to the ground and start over. The same applies in virtually every city with a prominent work of brutalist-school architecture.
I’m with the median citizen, as I said. Destroy every example of brutalism, everywhere, except one, and then turn that one into a pigeon colony to serve as an example.
I’m sorry, but design schools have lost the plot since 1950. Hopefully if ornamentation becomes cheap owners will expect and demand it despite their architects crying about it.
As usual, interesting and informative, thanks.
There is a lot to say, you made me curious. A few ideas that may influence concrete prices
> Sand availability (quality !)
> CO2 emissions costs integration in the EU with the ETS
> Who will drive the demand and how big will it be ? (China, India, African countries)
Always a blast to read you !
Interesting point on sand availability, as much traditional stonework relies on sand/cement based mortar (if not on the scale of concrete)
Would love to follow up analysis looking at the duration of value created with stone.
Back in the 1980s, I remember a discussion about whether the processor of the future would be the CISC with an x86 instruction set or RISC with a much simpler instruction set. RISC had obvious speed and design advantages. My friend pointed out that the industry had standardized on x86, so the sheer volume production would drive immense performance improvements. If you look inside any high performance x86 chip from the last three decades, you'd find a sophisticated set of circuits that turned the x86 CISC instruction flow into an internal adaptive RISC flow. Still, my friend was right. The sheer economic mass of the hardware and software industries put CISC chips way out ahead.
Only now has RISC started taking a lead. Apple, an immensely profitable company, had the sheer mass needed to advance RISC architecture in its A and M series. It might be possible for stone to standardize and become a serious, mass building material. It would take a massive effort and perhaps a patron firm, like Apple, with high enough profits to fund the necessary R&D.
One big downside is that "stone" covers a lot of ground. If you've ever had granite counters installed, you'd know that there are a lot of different kinds of granite with the differences being mainly esthetic. No one sees the steel or wood framing, and what they say about visible concrete structures is not always flattering. With stone used as a visible element, the material fabrication process cannot start until the building has been designed and materials chosen. Unless architects are willing to settle for a commodity set of stone materials, this puts stone at a disdavantage.
Great column! Thanks!
You argue that OSB is cheaper than lumber boards, and concrete then stone because of lower costs of supply but ignore demand. Demand and willingness to pay is significantly higher for stone and whole lumber.
In a competitive market then prices should approach the costs of production. I wonder if part of the reason lumber is more expensive is just profits by the lumber companies.
OSB is made from waste product. Concrete benefits from waste too
Given that stone associated with prestige, could you not start with the luxury market before reaching economics of scale. As you mentioned it is also far less carbon intensive than steel and cement, so you might also get some "environmentally conscious" corporations to buy it as well. Basically do the Tesla strategy.
What are using to automate the stone shaping process? CNC machining? If so would the lower cost of electricity due to solar panels lead to the strategy becoming more viable?
A conceptual design for a stone skyscraper? Check out the ones Ferdinand Pouillon actually built in postwar France: https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fernand_Pouillon
A very good writeup, thank you.
I will add the following:
Re: stone - the problems with stone are as you noted, but you left out a major one: transportation. You reference this indirectly with the flowable section, but large pre-worked stone objects are incredibly unwieldy to transport - and probably extremely expensive to transport across long distances. I am quite certain there are no large stone quarries near most places that would want to build a 30 story stone tower (of Babel lol), so this is not a purely academic nit to pick. I don't know the numbers, but I would be shocked if the cost and difficulty of transporting massive numbers of large stone support elements is not dramatically higher than steel and pourable concrete.
Semiconductors: What you wrote is not incorrect but is misleading.
It is misleading because you are not looking more deeply into the actual economics of the silicon design chain. In particular - the structural change between say, 1999 and today lies in startup costs.
In 1999, you could tape out a chip for $50,000. The unit costs were higher, but this is mostly a function of the smaller diameter wafers used back then.
In contrast, by 2010 the cost of taping out a new chip was $10 million, and today it is probably closer (or over) $50 million. The extra layers and what not you reference are part of this, but it is also that the small geometries require new steps before production such as optical proximity correction (OPC). The geometry changes also broke Intel's previous economic model of "design once, fabricate to 3 process geometries". The effect of the economic change above is that it effectively destroyed the entire small company/startup ecosystem of chip design.
It isn't hard to raise $500K to tape out a $50K chip several times to get a product to test on the market - but it is virtually impossible to raise $50M to do the same with $10M tapeouts - and I don't even want to think about $50M tapeouts.
The effect was to change what used to be a widely varied and dynamic chip design ecosystem into a handful of giant corporations, with all of the attendant loss of innovation or any other forms of competition besides deep pockets and massive market presence.
Circling back to stone - it would not shock me if an unspoken objective of these "stone" advocates is precisely the same dynamic as I note above: pourable concrete and steel is a commodity but fancy automated stone cutting is not.
The owners of this fancy tech can exert massive disproportionate market control if only they can force the existing methods out of common practice by, for example, stressing the CO2 emissions aspect of concrete and steel production. Studies will be commissioned decrying the terrible CO2 emissions profile of making concrete while ignoring the CO2 emissions of trucking hundreds of thousands of tons of stone, hundreds of miles or more.
Just saying.
Convincing in general but I think when environmentally minded people talk about the waste inherent in long distance shipping, they mean carbon emissions. A bit weird to counter that argument by focusing on financial costs, obviously it’s cheap to ship cotton to Bangladesh, otherwise corporations wouldn’t do it…
I worked for a construction company who built load-bearing stone structures using CNC technology. It was amazing and breath-taking work. We created processes to reduce costs wherever we could. BUT it was incredibly labor intensive due to the skill needed to set the incredibly heavy stone. We mostly did dry-stacked because it highlighted the stone material qualities & stone masons' craft. Stone cutting with CNCs is inherently a slow process due to the hardness of the material. You can finish the material smooth with the machines, but it depends on the aesthetics desired how long it will take. Finishing with just a saw blade will get you sort of a range of finishes that are like using 50 grit sand paper versus 150 grit. You can polish with the machines, but that takes more time. This process requires water (which we recycled) to prevent the blades/tools from overheating. We were able to run the machines overnight, but they always needed someone to be there to monitor it. Stone has natural inclusions (other material trapped inside the stone) that could be harder or softer than the main stone you're cutting which can cause the equipment to "burp" so the operator needs to pay close attention in case they need to stop or adjust the speed of the blade/tool. Processing materials to the shapes that are needed are just faster in wood, concrete, and steel because their processes are different as mentioned in the article. It certainly is a low cost raw material and when done correctly, adds beauty, thermal mass, and longevity, but there needs to be a lot of evaluation across the whole process to make it competitive in cost to other building systems. Thanks so much for all the great articles. I am generally a skeptic of these sorts of claims, too, but am optimistic that there are people out there thinking about this stuff!
Effective responses of buildings to earthquakes require some degree of flexibility (i.e., compressive and expansive capacity), so that they can sway or otherwise adjust. This seems to me a hard ask for stone.
The only use case in which stone makes economic sense (kinda-sorts) is the one it lasted longest in: compression-bearing structural systems in urban infrastructure, most prominently tunnel arches and arch bridges.
And that only because if it’s dry fit its lifespan is damned near infinite and lifecycle costs very, very low.
And even that doesn’t pencil out well with a reasonable discount rate.
Bringing down the cost of a luxury good and turning it into a mass market luxury is nice but not earth-shattering, so no startup will ever admit that’s what they’re doing. But making more buildings look a bit better is good and we should be happy about it!